Since I found a different method to achieve my goal, and since no answer was posted to my previous question, I've changed the question to match the answer I found.
Is there a way to turn off my laptop's monitor and turn on the external monitor(and vice-versa) entirely from the command line?
53 Answers
With the commands
xrandr --output VGA-0 --auto xrandr --output LVDS --off The screen automatically transfers to the external display. It doesn't even need sudo powers. To find out the name of the displays just do:
xrandr -q Which should give something like:
VGA-0 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 338mm x 270mm ... LVDS connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) ... Extending the displays can probably be achieved in a similar manner.
4This is most certainly NOT a direct answer to your question. But I found it helpful in my use case. This is not an export of the config file, but it does show how to automate disper in a shell script. I'm setting this up to run every time I dock/un-dock and it seems to be fixing my display issues when docking and undocking my laptop:
You have to have disper and Python installed.
#!/bin/sh # # Detect displays and move panels to the primary display # PYTHON=python2.6 DISPER=/usr/bin/disper # disper command will detect and configure monitors $PYTHON $DISPER --displays=auto -e -t left # parse output from disper tool how many displays we have attached # disper prints 2 lines per displer lines=`$PYTHON $DISPER -l|wc -l` display_count=$((lines / 2)) echo $display_count echo "Detected display count:" $display_count # Make sure that we move panels to the correct display based # on the display count if [ $display_count = 1 ] ; then echo "Moving panels to the internal LCD display" gconftool-2 \ --set "/apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0/monitor" \ --type integer "0" gconftool-2 \ --set "/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/monitor" \ --type integer "0" sleep 5 pkill gnome-panel else echo "Moving panels to the external display" gconftool-2 \ --set "/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/monitor" \ --type integer "1" gconftool-2 \ --set "/apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0/monitor" \ --type integer "1" sleep 5 pkill gnome-panel fi Just as an additional example stemming from the question/answer, here's the desktop launcher file I created which (1st) switches on the external monitor to the desired resolution and (2nd) then switches off the laptop screen.
[Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name[en_US]=Laptop > Ext Exec=sh -c "xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode 1366x768 && xrandr --output eDP-1 --off" Encoding=UTF-8 Wrapping the commands in a shell means I can execute the two commands at once and point a keyboard shortcut to this .desktop file. So I've set one of my keyboard function keys to this desktop launcher (to switch from laptop to external) and then another key which runs the opposite desktop shortcut file. Saves a lot of time from the old way I was doing this (launching monitors control panel and manually enabling/disabling each one every time).
